A quick word before the newsletter this week…

If you are a senior pastor or student pastor, you know the challenges facing young people today. The culture has its ideologies and values aimed at their hearts and minds. Our churches must engage intentionally in equipping the next generation. I’d personally love to invite you to do that with us at Knowing Jesus Ministries. We have our Engaging Truth Conference this fall. And we have our Arise Camps for students summer 2024. These resources exist to help keep your students in the fight. Partner with us in helping them fight the good fight of faith in a world that wants to snuff it out.

I think it is human nature to focus on improving our weaknesses. This gets nurtured in us if we played sports as kids. This happens in education too. Most places we found ourselves as kids tried to help us improve our weaknesses.

In some ways, improving your weaknesses is fine. We should be self-aware enough to know our weaknesses. And if we know our weaknesses, we should try to mitigate them from effecting the things that we do. But rarely were we taught, or even taught today, to focus on our strengths.

That is the subject of this week’s newsletter.

Make Strengths Stronger

Every pastor and leader has strengths and weaknesses. You know what they are. Most likely your congregation and/or team know what they are. Rather than spending your time trying to eliminate those weaknesses, give your time to increasing the areas where you are strong.

A good vision-caster should spend more time improving and leveraging that skill. Great preachers should keep sharpening that tool. A strong developer of leaders should continue pouring energy and fuel into doing more of it and growing their effectiveness.

Stop being a weakness-focused leader. Know and leverage your strengths, and the strengths of those around you.

1 Actionable Tip

Focus more time on developing your strengths than you do improving your weaknesses.

Consider this idea for a moment: improving your strengths by making them even more effective, brings more fruit and results than incrementally moving your deficits from “weak” to “mediocre.”

It brings more fruit for a good preacher to get even better at preaching than it is for him to struggle at administration but spend all his time trying to get better at it. Some things are not in our wheelhouse. I’ll never be a great administrative guy. It’s just not in my gifts. If I direct most of my energies at improving on this, I will get better, but not in portion to the time it would require of me.

What are the areas where you are weaker? Do you spend tons of time trying to improve them?

What about your strengths? What are they? How are you growing them even stronger?

Mitigate your weaknesses by deploying the strengths of others. Quit trying to be great at everything and direct your attention to where you truly can be great.